Tuesday, 4 April 2017

I love April

Glamis Village in April
James MacIntosh Patrick

I love April.

It was Mother’s birthday month and I associate
it with the big bouquet we made for
her with the flowers of the garden, mainly with irises and apple blossoms. She
had a fondness for irises and she nursed and raised the plants, exchanging
rhizomes with friends and collectors near our house: they came in all sorts of
hues from the simple, straight, blue ones to the fat gorgeous golden yellow
others, going through browns, pinks, whites, slightly striped, zebra, cut out, bearded petals. It seemed that the variations were infinite. We kept to the simple dark
purple ones that were swathed in the frothy apple blossoms, a candid white tinged
with a blush of pink rose. We would have devastated the orchard so we were left
two or three trees which gave each year a crop of acid apples that never
matured and which we used in the early autumn as prime elements to our
desperate experiences to make cider.

Life is to be compared with April according to William
Cowper:
"It is a sort of April-weather life that we lead in this world.
A little sunshine is generally the prelude to a storm." And nowadays more than ever I do
think so. What little joys we have are soon drowned by a shower of sorrows.

Spring in Eckdale
James MacIntosh Patrick

Elder Girl is still in hospital.
I have been told by our doctor that she does not want to get up by herself, to
stand up, to walk. Her food is processed and rolled and she eats it with a
spoon. She speaks when she is spoken to and she passes the day sitting in an
armchair. “An ideal patient”, said Matron over the phone. She never complains
and she never moves.” Our doctor was
enthusiastic about the notion of our joining her in hospital and was highly
surprised when I refused, telling him we were not ill and asking him to hasten
her return home. “She will be a weight upon you”, he said, eyeing me dubiously.
“And she will need continuous care with nurses at least twice a day, special
implements like an electric armchair, another chair in which she will spend her
days, people to transfer her from bed to chair and from chair to bed. “That
sort of things.” “All right”, I answered, let’s get the help we need and have
her back with us in her own home and environment.” “She is aging, you know”, he
said. ”She is an old lady according to her pathology. She is aging fast.” I bit
my lips thinking that his prescription of antidepressants, anxiolytics and
sleeping pills maintained her surely in a state of half dozing that could
easily pass for early senescence. He is glad to have slotted Elder Girl into
her proper little square: at long last, she is under the thumb of the medical profession
and made to behave as a proper Down Syndrome person.

I feel guilty to have let her out
of my sight. I should have passed over our doctor’s injunction to let her go to
the main hospital in Périgueux alone. From there she was dispatched to this
wretched country hospital where I cannot go and see her regularly to keep her
in the world of the living. Guilty. Guilty.

In order to keep my mind busy, I
thought about poetry. No, I will not talk about “April, the cruellest of months”
and about T.S. Eliot. I tried to lift up my spirits with the thought that this
month is the promise of gold and blue days.

April, 1885

Wanton with long delay the gay spring leaping
cometh;

The
blackthorn starreth now his bough on the eve of May:

All
day in the sweet box-tree the bee for pleasure hummeth:

The cuckoo sends afloat his note on the air
all day;

Now dewy nights again and rain in gentle
shower

At root of tree and flower have quenched the
winter's drouth.

On
high the hot sun smiles, and banks of cloud uptower

In bulging heads that crowd for miles the
dazzling south.

Robert Bridges,The
Shorter Poems(1896).

Have you noted the internal rhymes within
lines (delay/gay, now/bough,et
cetera), the combination of end rhymes and internal rhymes across three
lines (cometh/starreth/hummeth, shower/flower/uptower), and the internal rhymes
across lines (smiles/miles, cloud/crowd)?

The Cornish April
Adrian Paul Allinson

The garden is sadly neglected but
while going through it to open the gate for the cleaning lady’s car, I noticed
how much the daffodils are on the wane, that tulips are perking up, that violets
smile through blades of new grass, and that pâquerettes,
these small, short-stemmed, wild daisies that are in full bloom for Easter
(thus their name, as Easter is Pâques
in French) are already dotting the whole grounds with the help of primroses and
cowslips. April is a time of arrivals and departures.

In the Valley

On this first evening of April

Things look wintry still:

Not a
leaf on the tree,

Not a
cloud in the sky,

Only a
young moon high above the clear green west

And a few stars by and by.

Yet Spring inhabits round like a spirit.

I am
sure of it

By the swoon on the sense,

By the
dazzle on the eye,

By the
long, long sigh that traverses my breast

And yet no reason why.

O lovely Quiet, am I never to be blest?

Time,
even now you haste.

Between
the lamb's bleat and the ewe's reply

A star has come into the sky.

Sylvia Townsend Warner,Time
Importuned(1928).

Here, "thedazzlingsouth" of Bridges in the
former poem meets "thedazzleon the eye" of Warner. And, coincidentally, Warner employs the same technique of end rhymes and
internal rhymes across three lines used by Bridges: sky/high/by;
eye/sigh/why.

April in Epping
Lucien Pissaro

April's mutability is embodied in
the trees: their branches are still mostly bare, but, from a distance,
they seem to be enveloped in a yellow-green haze. Mutabilityandpromise. “Nature ‘s first green is gold” says
Robert Frost.

April

Exactly: where the winter was

The spring has come: I see her now

In the fields, and as she goes

The flowers spring, nobody knows how.

C. H. Sisson,What
and Who(Carcanet Press
1994).

April Sunshine
Victor Elford

But however much I want to
glorify spring, I cannot prevent myself from worry for Elder Girl and
melancholy for the time “when we were young” (with
A.A. Milne) and when we were roughly and rudely pruning the apple trees with
laughter to please Mother on her birth day.

3 comments:

You must try not to blame yourself. It's reassuring to see you are reading poetry, are writing, keeping finding pictures. The era you have chosen is one where poetry is written to console and evoke beauty. I agree that the drugs may have precipitated this aging crisis. Still we cannot fight time which is part of why she succumbed. Is there any hope she will be able to leave the hospital?